World/Nation Briefs May 31, 2013
FBI: Ricin letter sent to Obama from Spokane
SEATTLE - A suspicious letter containing the deadly poison ricin was mailed to President Barack Obama from Spokane, Wash., on the same day similar ricin-tainted letters were mailed to a federal judge and a post office, the FBI said Thursday.
A man arrested last week in Spokane has been charged with sending the letter to the Spokane-based judge after that letter and the letter to the post office were intercepted May 14.
The Obama letter was intercepted May 22, along with a similar letter sent to Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, the Seattle FBI office said in a written statement.
The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said all four envelopes were postmarked May 13 in Spokane and are in the possession of law enforcement. Three contained active ricin toxin, but the letter sent to the Air Force base continues to undergo testing. Each was addressed by hand in red ink.
Scientists find mammoth body with liquid blood
MOSCOW - A perfectly preserved woolly mammoth carcass with liquid blood has been found on a remote Arctic island, fueling hopes of cloning the Ice Age animal, Russian scientists said Thursday.
The carcass was in such good shape because its lower part was stuck in pure ice, said Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the Mammoth Museum, who led the expedition into the Lyakhovsky Islands off the Siberian coast.
"The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out," he said.
Wooly mammoths are thought to have died out around 10,000 years ago, although scientists think small groups of them lived longer in Alaska and on islands off Siberia.
Scientists have deciphered much of the woolly mammoth's genetic code from their hair, and some believe it's possible to clone them if living cells are found
U.S. household wealth lags
in recovery
WASHINGTON - The average U.S. household has a long way to go to recover the wealth it lost to the Great Recession, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded Thursday.
The typical household has regained less than half its wealth, the analysis found. A separate Federal Reserve report in March calculated that Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses.
Household wealth plunged $16 trillion from the third quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2009. By the final three months of 2012, American households as a group had regained $14.7 trillion.
Yet once those figures are adjusted for inflation and averaged across the U.S. population, the picture doesn't look so bright: The average household has recovered only 45 percent of its wealth, the St. Louis Fed concluded.
- The Associated Press